Capable of scanning millions of e-mails a second, Carnivore can easily
be used to monitor everybody's e-mail messages and transactions,
including banking and Internet commerce. If they want to, the feds can
find out what books you're buying online, what kind of banking
transactions you conduct - in short, everything you do when you go
online and send e-mail, whether private or commercial.

According to the bureau, they've used Carnivore - so called because it
can digest the "meat" of the information they're looking for - in less
than 100 cases, in most cases to locate hackers but also to track terrorist
and narcotics activities.

But there is nothing to stop Carnivore from making a meal of your
e-mail messages and transactions if they decide that's what they want to
do and can get a judge to issue a court order allowing them to tap your
e-mail as they would your phones.

Carnivore could conceivably monitor all the e-mail that moves through
an ISP - not merely messages sent to or from the subject allegedly being
monitored. Critics compare it to eavesdropping on all the phones in a
neighborhood simply to zero in on just one phone.

Disturbingly, the FBI has prevailed in challenges against forcing ISPs to
allow Carnivore to be installed in their offices. According to the Wall
Street Journal, one unidentified ISP put up a legal fight against
Carnivore early this year and lost.

The FBI defends Carnivore, insisting it is used selectively and monitors
only the e-mail of the subject. They say that messages belonging to those
not being probed, even if criminal, would not be admissible in court.

"The volume of e-mail in a location is generally fairly small and being
managed by a small number of e-mail servers on a fairly low-speed
network," said Marcus Thomas, chief of the FBI's cyber technology
section.

"The system is not unlike 'sniffers' used within the networks every day."

That fails to satisfy critics such as Sobel. He says Carnivore is similar to
Russia's surveillance system, called "SORM," which all Russian ISPs are
forced to install to allow the government to spy on whomever it
chooses.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson insists that law-abiding citizens have
nothing to fear from Carnivore. "Anytime we develop a system, we're
basically balancing the interests of national security against that of the
privacy of the public," he said.